On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Tim May wrote:
Could our group be charged as a "continuing criminal enterprise" under the RICO statute?
Probably. Under RICO and associated laws they can get anyone for anything. Well, except Komrade Klinton.
It occurs to me that if Carl Johnson, who is linked several times to our group/list in the court documents, is successfully prosecuted,then the Feds may be able to cite both Bell and Johnson as evidence of a conspiracy.
Which probably wouldn't be too hard to prove, as many of us have admitted to conspiring mightily to undermine various institutions. (And we even use encypted e-mail, the very essence of a secret conspiracy.)
It might be fun to see them try this. Would they charge some of us as ringleaders? Or would they declare the entity itself an illegal organization? (As they have done with various cultural, political, and even religous groups, like Hezbollah, the Aum religion, etc.)
Interesting times.
Quite. One partial solution I see is to rewrite premail in C so it runs at a respectable speed[1], fix some of the bugs[2], integrate it with more mailers, and then encourage everybody to subscribe through nyms. I'd love to see them try to prosecute users at nym.alias.net by presenting a court order to Community Connexion in Oakland. ;) [1] Yes, it's really slow on slower machines. [2] One of the most obvious is when Premail sends out 3 copies of a message for a 2 remailer chain, 9 copies for a 3 remailer chain, something like 27 for a 4 remailer chain, and so on. If nothing else, that's a security hole which allows people to know how many warrants they will need.